The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

hosting

The relationship between Airbnb and its home city of San Francisco is complicated to say the least. the least. The two have repeatedly duked it out over regulations, taxes, and liability, and now the stage is set for yet another battle between the city and the home-sharing platform, as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors considers reducing the number of days people in the city can rent out their homes each year. [More]

Throwing a Memorial Day get-together in a recession doesn’t have to mean just putting out a box of store-brand Ritz crackers. Over at CNBC, Celebrity chef Guy Fieri shares a few simple tweaks for serving up a feast this weekend without having to go into hock. [More]

I need help—or at least, just to kvetch. You remember that big $7.5 million snafu Dreamhost made? Well, I received an invoice the day before and trustingly paid it with my credit card. Then, I learned—from Consumerist, no less, not from Dreamhost—about the billing mistake. Nowhere did Dreamhost mention that legitimate invoices were *also* sent out. I looked at the invoice they sent me and noted the error in the date:

Dreamhost would like you to know that its very very sorry for accidentally billing its customers $7.5 million it wasn’t actually owed. You see, someone typed 2008 when they really meant 2007 and their billing system decided to charge all of their customers in advance for the entire 2008 calendar year. This included debiting huge amounts of money from people’s checking accounts and all the “worst possible scenario” situations you could possibly imagine.

Kiplinger set itself three basic rules to follow for affordable holiday entertaining: “make it a team effort” by splitting hosting duties or having guests bring food, “borrow what you don’t have,” and ” be creative.” Following these rules, they came up with ten ideas for holiday get-togethers that even people on tight budgets can pull off. Here are the first three.

We apologize for the slower updates today, although we would also like to acknowledge that this is the first Friday The Consumerist has even been open for business, so maybe we should just pretend this is going to be standard operating procedure. We’ve been on the phone for about two hours trying to gain access to two domains that were registered about five years ago with Westhost. As you may have gathered from this post, it did not go very well.